The Project Gutenberg eBook ofThe Fire FlowerThis ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.Title: The Fire FlowerAuthor: Jackson GregoryRelease date: July 13, 2021 [eBook #65833]Most recently updated: October 18, 2024Language: EnglishOriginal publication: United States: The Frank A. Munsey Company, 1917Credits: Roger Frank and Sue Clark. This file was produced from images generously made available by The Pulp Magazine Project.*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE FIRE FLOWER ***
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.
Title: The Fire FlowerAuthor: Jackson GregoryRelease date: July 13, 2021 [eBook #65833]Most recently updated: October 18, 2024Language: EnglishOriginal publication: United States: The Frank A. Munsey Company, 1917Credits: Roger Frank and Sue Clark. This file was produced from images generously made available by The Pulp Magazine Project.
Title: The Fire Flower
Author: Jackson Gregory
Author: Jackson Gregory
Release date: July 13, 2021 [eBook #65833]Most recently updated: October 18, 2024
Language: English
Original publication: United States: The Frank A. Munsey Company, 1917
Credits: Roger Frank and Sue Clark. This file was produced from images generously made available by The Pulp Magazine Project.
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE FIRE FLOWER ***
The Fire Flower
by Jackson GregoryAuthor of “The Short Cut,” “Wolf Breed,” “The Outlaw,” etc.
by Jackson Gregory
Author of “The Short Cut,” “Wolf Breed,” “The Outlaw,” etc.
Transcriber’s Note: This story appeared in the March 3, 1917 issue of theAll-Story Weeklymagazine published by the Frank T. Munsey Company.
Transcriber’s Note: This story appeared in the March 3, 1917 issue of theAll-Story Weeklymagazine published by the Frank T. Munsey Company.
Sheldon had plunged on into this new country rather recklessly, being in reckless mood. Now, five days northward of Belle Fortune, he knew that he had somewhere taken the wrong trail.
The knowledge came upon him gradually. There was the suspicion before ten o’clock that morning, when the stream he followed seemed to him to be running a little too much to the northwest. But he had pushed on, watchful of every step, seeking a blazed tree or the monument of a stone set upon a rock.
When he made camp at noon he was still undecided, inclined to believe that the wise thing would be to turn back. But he did not turn back. He was his own man now; all time was before him; the gigantic wilderness about him was grateful. At night, when he had yanked his small pack down from his horse’s saddle, suspicion had grown into certainty. He smoked his good-night pipe in deep content.
If you could run a line straight from Belle Fortune to Ruminoff Shanty—and you’d want both tunnel and aeroplane to do the job nicely!—your line would measure exactly two hundred and forty miles. It would cut almost in halves the Sasnokee-keewan, the country into which few men come, let entirely alone by the Indians who with simple emphasis term it “Bad Country.”
Men have found gold on Gold River, where the Russian camp of Ruminoff Shanty made history half a century ago; they have taken out the pay-dirt at Belle Fortune. Between the two points they have made many trails during fifty years, trails which invariably turn to east or west of the Sasnokee-keewan. For here is a land of fierce, iron-boweled mountains, of tangled brush which grows thick and defies the traveler, of long reaches, of lava-rock and granite, of mad, white, raging winters.
“Leave it alone,” men say down in Belle Fortune and up in Ruminoff. “It’s No-Luck Land. Many a poor devil’s gone in that never came out. And never a man brought a show of color out of it.”
Since Belle Fortune had dropped one day behind him, it had all been new country to Sheldon. Although summer was on its way, there had been few men before him since the winter had torn out the trails. Here and there, upon the north slopes and in the shaded cañons, patches and mounds of snow were thawing slowly.
More than once had he come to a forking of the ways, but he had pushed on without hesitating, content to be driving ever deeper into the wilderness. He planned vaguely on reaching French Meadows by way of the upper waters of the Little Smoky, climbing the ridge whence rumor had it you could see fifteen small lakes at once. But what mattered it, French Meadows or the very heart of the Sasnokee-keewan?
A man who took life as it came, was John Sheldon; who lived joyously, heedlessly, often enough recklessly. When other men grumbled he had been known to laugh. While these last lean, hard years had toughened both physical and mental fiber, they had not hardened his heart. And yet, a short five days ago, he had had murder in his heart.
He had just made his “pile”; he, with Charlie Ward, who, Sheldon had thought, was straight. And straight the poor devil would have been had it not been that he was weak and there was a woman. He wanted her; she wanted his money. It’s an old story.
Sheldon for once was roused from his careless, good-natured acceptance of what the day might bring. He had befriended Ward, and Ward had robbed him. In the first flare of wrath he took up the man’s trail. He followed the two for ten days, coming up with them then at Belle Fortune.
There had been ten days of riot, wine and cards and roulette-wheel, for Charlie Ward and the woman. Sheldon, getting word here and there, had had little hope of recovering his money. But he did not expect what he did find. Charlie was dying—had shot himself in a fit of remorseful despondency. The woman was staring at him, grief-stricken, stunned, utterly human after all.
She had loved him, it seemed; that was the strange part of it. The few gold pieces which were left she hurled at Sheldon as he stood in the door, cursing him. He turned, heard Charlie’s gasps through the chink of the coins, went out, tossed his revolver into the road, bought a pack outfit, shouldered a rifle, and left Belle Fortune “for a hunting trip,” as he explained it to himself. He had never got a bear in his life and—
And there is nothing in all the world like the deepest solitude of the woods to take out of a man’s heart the bitterness of revenge. Sheldon was a little ashamed of himself. He wanted to forget gold and the seeking thereof. And therefore, perhaps, his fate took it upon herself to hide a certain forking of the trails under a patch of snow so that he turned away from French Meadows and into the Sasnokee-keewan.
Now he was lost. Lost merely in so far as he did not know where he was; not that he need worry about being able to retrace his steps. He had provisions, ammunition, fishing tackle, bedding; was in a corner of the world where men did not frequently come, and could stay here the whole summer if he saw fit. He had been hunting gold all the years of his life, it seemed to him. What had it brought him? What good had it done him? Never was man in better mood to be lost than was John Sheldon as he knocked out his pipe, rolled into his blankets, and went to sleep.
Now, the sixth day out he watched his way warily. If he were not already in the Sasnokee-keewan, he should to-day, or by to-morrow noon at the latest, come to the first of the Nine Lakes. He had studied the stars last night; he had watched the sun to-day. It was guesswork at best, since he had had no thought to prick his way by map.
Night came again, and he looked from a ridge down upon other ridges, some bare and granite-topped, some timbered, with here and there a tall peak looking out across the broken miles, with no hint of Lake Nopong. He made his way down a long slope in the thickening dusk, seeking a grassy spot to tether his packhorse. That night the animal crunched sunflower leaves and the tenderer shoots of the mountain bushes. With the dawn Sheldon again pushed on, seeking better pasture.
Late that afternoon he came into a delightfully green meadow, where a raging creek grew suddenly gentle and wandered through crisp herbage and little white flowers. There was a confusion of deer-tracks where a narrow trail slipped through the alders of the creek banks. Upon the rim of the meadow was a great log freshly torn into bits, as though by the great paws of a bear.
Under a tall, isolated cedar about whose base there was dry ground, Sheldon removed the canvas-rolled pack and the pack-saddle, turning his horse into an alder-surrounded arm of the meadow where the grass was thickest and tallest. While the sun was still high he cut the branches which he would throw his blankets upon, fried his bacon and potatoes, boiled his coffee, and ate heartily.
Then he sat upon the log at which the bear had torn, saw the tracks and nodded over them, noting that they were only a few days old—smoked his pipe, and out of the fulness of content watched his hungry horse ripping away at the lush grass.
“Take your time, Buck, old boy,” he said gently. “We’ll stay right here until you get a bellyful. We don’t have to move on until snow flies, if we don’t want to. I think that this is one of the spots of the world we’ve been looking for a long time. I’d lay a man a bet, two to one and he names the stakes, that there’s not another human being in three days’ walk.”
And a very little after sunset, with the same thought soothing him, he went to sleep.
The seventh day out Sheldon began in practical manner by shaving. His beard was beginning to turn in and itch. And, even upon trips like this, he had yet to understand why a fellow shouldn’t include in his pack the razor, brush, and soap, which, altogether, occupied no more space than a pocket tin of tobacco.
He was up and about in the full glory of the morning, before the last star had gone. A grub from a fallen log went onto a hook, into the creek, and down a trout’s eager throat, and the trout itself was brown in the pan almost as the coffee began to bubble over. Thirty minutes after he had waked, he was leading the full-stomached Buck northward along the stream’s grassy banks.
The world seemed a good place to live in this morning, clean and sweet, blown through with the scents of green growing things. The ravine widened before him; the timber was big boled with grassy, open spaces; though there was no sign of a trail other than the tracks left by wild things coming to feed and water, he swung on briskly.
“If I really am in the Sasnokee-keewan,” he told himself early in the day, “Then men have maligned it, or else I have stumbled into a corner of it they have missed somehow. It strikes me as the nearest thing imaginable to the earthly paradise.”
He had turned out to the right, following the open, coming close under a line of cliffs which stood up, sheer and formidable, along the edge of the meadow. And then, suddenly, unexpectedly, he came upon the first sign he had had for three days that a man had ever been before him in these endless woods. Upon the rocky ground at the foot of the cliffs was a man’s skeleton.
Sheldon stopped and stared. The thing shocked him. It seemed inconceivable that a man could have died here, miserably as this poor fellow had done, alone, crying out aloud to the solitudes which answered him softly with gently stirring branches and murmuring water. Sheldon’s mood, one of serene, ineffable peace, had had so strong a grasp upon him that this sign of tragedy and death was hard to grasp.
He stood long, staring down at the heap of bones. They were tumbled this way and that. He shuddered. And yet he stood there, fascinated, wondering, letting his suddenly awakened, overstimulated imagination have its way.
There came the query: “What killed him?”
Sheldon looked up at the cliffs. The man might have fallen. But the skull was intact; there had been no fracture there. Nor—Sheldon forgot his previous revulsion of feeling in his strong curiosity—nor was there a broken bone of arm or leg to indicate a fall. The bones were large; it had been a big man, six feet or over, and heavy. No; in spite of the position of the disordered skeleton, death had not come that way.
For half an hour Sheldon lingered here, restrained a little by the thoughts rising naturally to the occasion, seeking to read the riddle set before him. There were no rattlesnakes here, no poisonous insects at these altitudes. The man had not fallen. To come here at all he must have been one who knew the mountains; then he had not starved, for the streams were filled with trout, and he would know the way to trap small game enough to keep life in him. And what man ever came so deep into the wild without a rifle?
It seemed to Sheldon that there was only one answer. The man must have got caught here in an early snowstorm; he must have lost his head; instead of going calmly about preparing shelter and laying up provisions for the winter, he must have raced on madly, getting more hopelessly lost at every bewildered step—and then the end had come, hideously.
At last Sheldon moved on, pondering the thoughts which centered about the white pile of bones which once, perhaps four or five or six years ago, had been a man. How the poor devil must have cursed the nights that blotted the world out, the winds which shrieked of snow, the mountains which rose like walls about a convict.
“What became of his gun?” cried Sheldon suddenly, speaking aloud. “The buckle from his belt, the metal things in his pockets, knife, coins, cartridges? The things which prowling animals can’t eat! They don’t carry such things off!”
He came back, walking swiftly. There was little grass so close to the cliffs; nothing but bare, rocky ground and a few bits of dry wood, two or three old cones dropped from a pine; nothing to hide the articles which Sheldon sought. But, although he made assurance doubly sure by searching carefully for more than an hour, back and forth along the cliffs, out among the trees, he found nothing. Not so much as the sole of a boot.
“And that,” muttered Sheldon, taking up Buck’s lead rope, “if a man asked me, is infernally strange.”
As he went on he strove frowningly for an explanation and found none. The man had not been alone? He had had a companion? This companion had taken his rifle, his knife and watch, or whatever might have been in his pockets, and had gone on. Possibly. But, then, why had he not taken the time to bury the body? And how was it that there was not a single shred of clothing?
“Coyotes may be so everlastingly hungry up here that they eat a man’s boots, soles, nails and all!” grunted Sheldon. “Only—I am not the kind of a tenderfoot to believe that particular brand of fairy tale. There’s not even a button!”
It is the way of the human intellect to contend with locks upon doors which shut on secrets. The mind, given half of the story, demands the remainder. John Sheldon, as he trudged on, grew half angry with himself because he could not answer the questions which insisted upon having answers. But before noon he had almost forgotten the scattered bones under the cliffs, the matter thrust to one rim of his thoughts which must now be given over almost entirely to finding trail.
For no longer was there meadow-land under foot. The strip of fairly level, grassy land was gone abruptly; beyond lay boulder-strewn slopes, fringed with dense brush, all but impassable to the packhorse.
Often the man must leave the animal while he went ahead seeking a way; often must the two of them turn back for some unexpected fall of cliff, all unseen until they were close to the edge, compelling them to retrace their steps perhaps a hundred yards, or five hundred, and many a time did Sheldon begin to think that the way was shut to the plucky brute that labored on under his pack.
But always he found a way on, a way down. And always, being a man used to the woods, did he keep in mind that the time might come when he’d have to turn back for good. If he could in time win on through, come out at the north end of the Sasnokee-keewan, then he would have had a trip which left nothing to be desired.
If, on the other hand, there came cliffs across the trail which Buck could not make his way down, around which they could not go—why, then, it was as well to have the way open this way. For Sheldon had no thought to desert the horse, without which just now he’d make far better time.
It was the hardest day he had had. That means that half a dozen times between dawn and dark the man hesitated, on the verge of turning back. Alone, he could have gone on, and with twice the speed; leading Buck, he wondered many a time if he could push on another mile without rewarding his horse with a broken leg. And yet, being a man who disliked turning back, and having to do with a horse that put all of his faith in his master unquestioningly, he put another ten miles between him and Belle Fortune that long, hard day.
In the afternoon he was forced to leave the creek which was rapidly growing into a river which shot shouting down through a rocky gorge, narrow and steep-sided. As the stream began turning off to the west, Sheldon climbed out of its cañon, made a wide détour to avoid a string of bare peaks lifting against the northern sky-line, and made a slow and difficult way over the ridge. In a sort of saddle he left his panting horse, while he clambered to a spire of rock lifted a score of feet above the pass.
He could look back from here and see the stream he had left. Here and there he caught a glimpse of the water, slipping away between the trees or flashing over a boulder as it sped down toward the gorge. He was glad that he had turned aside as soon as he had done; there would have been no getting out of that chasm unless a man came back here, and he had lost enough time as it was.
He turned his eyes toward the north. A true wilderness, if God ever made one to defy the taming hand of man—a wilderness of mountains, an endless stretch of bare ridges and snow-capped peaks, a maze of steep-sided gorges like the one he had just quitted, a stern, all but trackless labyrinth in which a man, if he were not a fool, must keep his wits about him.
“Gods knows,” meditated Sheldon, his spirit touched with that awe which comes to a man who stands alone as he stood, looking down upon the world where the Deity has builded in fierce, untrammeled majesty, “a man is a little thing in a place like this. I suppose, if I were wise, I would turn tail and get out while I can.”
And again he pushed on, northward. There was little feed here for Buck; both horse and man wanted water. Though they had left the creek but two hours ago, the dry air and summer sun had stirred in them the thirst which sleeps so little out on the trail.
Sheldon knew that they had but to make their way down into another ravine to find water. In these mountains, especially at this early season, there was no need for one to suffer from thirst. From his vantage-point, his eyes sweeping back and forth among the peaks and ridges, he picked out the way he should go for the rest of the day, the general direction for to-morrow. And then, Buck’s lead-rope again in his hand, he turned down, gradually seeking the headwaters of the next stream, hoping for one of the tiny meadows like the one in which he had camped last night.
It was four o’clock when he started downward. It was nearly dark when he came to water. It was such country as he had never seen before. He fully expected to start back to-morrow. He had seen no game all day; he didn’t believe that either deer or bear came here. What the deuce would they come for? They had more brains than a man. Besides, two or three times Buck had fallen; the next thing would be a broken leg, and no excuse for it.
But, nevertheless, he must find pasturage for the night. The horse had had nothing but the tenderer twigs of young bushes all day, with now and then a handful of sunflower leaves. The dark had fallen; the moon was up before Sheldon found what he sought. And he admitted that he was in luck to find it at all.
The rocky slope, broken into little falls of cliff, had ended abruptly. There was an open space, timbered only by a few water-loving trees, the red willow and alder, and tall grass. Sheldon yanked off pack and pack saddle, tethered his horse, and went to drink.
The beauty of the brook—it was scarcely more here near the source—with the moonlight upon it, impressed him, tired as he was. There was a sandy bed, gravel strewn, unusual here, where the thing to be expected was the water-worn rocks. The current ran placidly, widening out to a willow-fringed pool. The grass stood six inches tall everywhere, straight, untrampled.
Sheldon threw himself down to drink. What he had thought the dead white limb of a tree, lying close to the water’s edge, was a bone. He found another. Then the skull, half buried in mud and grass. It was the skeleton of a man. The second in one day’s travel! And, though Sheldon looked that night and again the next morning, there was nothing to hint at the cause of this man’s death. Nor was there a gun, an ax, a pocket knife or watch or strip of boot leather—nothing but the bones which the seasons had whitened, here and there discolored by the soil into which they had sunk.
When a man is as hungry and tired as Sheldon was that night, he does not squander time in fruitless fancies. He made a rude meal swiftly, rolled into his blankets, and went to sleep. But he had muttered as he rolled over to keep the moonlight out of his eyes:
“We’re not going back yet, Buck, old horse. If other men got this far, we can go a little farther.”
And, though he was too tired to lie awake and think, he could not shut out of his dreams the fancies bred of the two discoveries. The stories which men told of the Sasnokee-keewan, the superstition-twisted tales of the Indians, came and went through his brain, distorted into a hundred guises. This was No-Luck Land—the land into which few men came; the land from which those few did not return. What got them? What killed them?
Out of a vision of some great, hideous, ghoulish being which robbed the dead, even to stripping the bodies of their clothing, Sheldon woke with a start. The moon shone full in his eyes. Something had wakened him. He heard it moving there, softly. He sat up, grasping his rifle. It was very still again suddenly. He could not locate the sound. Maybe it had been Buck, browsing. No; Buck was tethered beyond the alders, out of sight. No sound came from there; the horse no doubt was dozing.
He even got up, vaguely uneasy. He had awakened with the decidedly uncomfortable feeling that something was above him, staring down into his face. That, on top of the sort of dream which had been with him all night, bred in him a stubborn curiosity to know what the something was.
He went quietly and cautiously back and forth; to where Buck stood, hidden beyond the trees, dozing, as he had anticipated, across the brook. He lifted his shoulders distastefully as he stepped by the little pile of bones.
There was nothing. It might have been a cat, even a night bird breaking a twig in the nearest pine. Sheldon went back to his bed. But he was wide awake now. He lighted his pipe and for an hour sat up, smoking, his blanket about his shoulders.
He experienced a strange emotion—something defying analysis—that he could catalogue only uncertainly as loneliness. It was not fear—not strong enough for that. He wanted company; it was with a frown that he checked himself from going to bring his horse close in to his camp. That would have been childish.
He moved a little, sitting so that his back was against the tree.
It had been in the small hours of the night that Sheldon woke. The fire he had replenished before turning in was a mere bed of coals. He threw a log across it, and at last dozed. Again he was up and about with the first streaks of dawn. The sky was pearl-pink when he threw the diamond hitch and was ready to take up the trail again.
And now, calm-thoughted with the light of day, he hesitated. Should he go on? Or should he turn back?
As though for an answer, he went to the crossing where the scattered bones lay close to the water. And the answer to his question came to him, presenting him a fresh riddle. If he had stared wonderingly when he came upon the skull at the cliffs back yonder, now did he stare stupefied. There came a vague, misty fear that he was growing fanciful, that he was seeing things which did not exist. He got down on his knees, his face not two feet from the track in the sandy margin of the creek.
Something had passed there last night; the track was very fresh. Whatever it was that had wakened him had crossed here. And what was it? He sought to be certain; he must be conservative. The track was imperfect; the lapping of the water broke down the little ridges of sand the passing foot had pushed up; the imprint would be gone entirely in a few hours. And there was no other here, for the grass came close down to the water.
He looked quickly across the stream. There there was a little strip of wet soil. The water boiling unheeded about his boots, he strode across. Despite the man’s quiet nerves, his heart was beating like mad. For he saw that there was a track here, fresh, made last night. And another. Now he did not need to go down on his knees. The imprints were clearly outlined, as definite as though drawn upon a sheet of paper.
And they were the tracks of a bare, human foot.
If it had been the big track of a big man, Sheldon’s heart would not have hammered so. But it was the track that might have marked the passing here of a boy of ten or twelve—or of a girl!
“A child or a woman came last night and looked at me as I slept,” muttered the man wonderingly. “Here, God knows how many miles from anywhere! Barefooted, prowling around in the middle of the night! Good God! The cursed thing is uncanny!”
As he had felt it before, but now more overwhelmingly, was his soul oppressed with the bigness of the solitude about him. He was a pygmy who had blundered into a giant’s land. He was as a little boy in the inscrutable presence of majesty and mystery. For a little it seemed to him that in the still, white dawn he stood hemmed about by the supernatural.
Why should there be two white piles of unburied human bones here in a day’s travel? Why should there be a fresh track in the wet soil made by a little naked foot in the night? Why should every bit of metallic substance disappear from the presence of those dead men? Why should his visitor of last night peer down at him and then slip away, with no word?
He frowned. Unconsciously he was connecting the bleached skeleton and the fresh track. The man had been dead perhaps half a dozen years; the track had not been there so many hours. He was growing fanciful with a vengeance.
It was with an effort of will that he cleared his mind of the wild tales which he had heard told of the Sasnokee-keewan. For a little he sought to believe that he had been so hopelessly confused in his sense of direction that he had made a great curve and had come back to some one of the outposts of civilization; that even now he was separated only by a ridge, or by a bend in the cañon, from a lumber-camp or mining settlement. But he knew otherwise. One doesn’t find bleaching human bones lying disinterred upon the edge of a village.
He sought to follow the tracks across the bed of the cañon and could not. They here were lost in the grass, which was not tall enough to bow to the light passing. But a hundred yards farther down the creek he came upon them again, fresh tracks of little bare feet, clearly outlined in a muddy crossing. The imprint of the heel was faint; the toes had sunk deep.
“Running,” grunted Sheldon. “And going like the very devil, too, I’ll bet.”
He went back for Buck.
“We’re going on, old horse,” he informed his animal. “The Lord knows what we’re getting into. But if a kid of a boy can make it, I guess we can.”
For he preferred to think of it as a boy. That a barefoot woman should be running about here in the heart of the mountains, peering down at a man sleeping, scampering away as he woke—“prowling around,” as he put it—well, it was simpler to think of a half-grown boy doing it.
“Or a man stunted in his growth,” he thought for the first time.
And the thought remained with him. One could conceive of a man who had never got his full growth physically, who was stunted mentally as well, a half-crazed, half-wild being, who fled here, who subsisted in a state little short of savagery, who crept through the moonlit forests subtly stirred by the weird moon-madness, who hunted like the other wild things.
“Who slipped up behind a man and drove a knife into his back! Who even made way with the clothing, everything, leaving the bones to whiten through summer and winter as other animals of prey left the creatures they had killed!”
Big were the forests, limitless, seeming as vast as infinity itself, resting heavy and still upon a man’s soul. The feeling of last night, the loneliness, the sort of unnamed dread came back upon John Sheldon. He shook it off with an impatient imprecation. But all day it hovered about him. Again he was glad of his horse’s companionship.
Not a nervous man, still he was not without imagination. He began to be oppressed with the stillness of the wilderness. As he pushed on downstream, watchful for other tracks, he came into a valley which widened until it was perhaps a mile across, carpeted with grass, timbered with the biggest trees he had seen since leaving Belle Fortune, their boles five and six and seven feet through, every one a monument of majesty, planted centuries before some long-forgotten ancestor of John Sheldon learned of a land named America.
There were wide, open spaces. One looking through the giant trunks seemed always looking down the long, dimly lit aisle of the chief temple of the gods of the world. Power, and venerable age—and silence! A silence so eternal that it seemed veritably tangible and indomitable.
A man wanted at once to call out, to shatter the heavy stillness which bore upon his soul, and felt his lips grown mute. The creek gurgled, here and there a cone fell or there was the twitter of a bird; these sounds passed through the silence, accentuated it, were a part of it, a foil to it, but in no way disturbed the ancient reign of silence.
Through this world, which might have come at dawn from the hand of its Maker, Sheldon pushed on swiftly, his brain alive with a hundred questions and fancies. Where there was loose, soft dirt, where there was a likely crossing, he looked for tracks. And as hour after hour passed he found nothing to indicate that he was not, as he had imagined until this morning, alone in this part of the Sasnokee-keewan.
And yet he thought that last night’s visitor was ahead of him. True, a half-demented, supercunning wild man might have hidden behind any of those big tree-trunks, might even now be watching him with feverishly bright eyes. Sheldon must chance that; he could not seek behind every tree in this forest of countless thousands. But he could feel pretty well assured that the creature he sought had not fled to east or to west any considerable distance. For on either hand, seen here and there through the trees, the sides of the cañon rose to steep cliffs where a man would have to toil for hours to make his way half-way up.
Noon came. Again Sheldon was in a swiftly narrowing gorge. No longer was the world silent about him. The roar and thunder of water shouting and echoing through the rocky defile nearly deafened him. Suddenly his path seemed shut off in front. It was impossible to get a horse over the ridge here on either hand; impossible to ford the torrent where many a treacherous hole hid under boiling water. He lunched and rested here, wondering if he must turn back.
While Buck browsed, Sheldon sought the way out. He turned to his right, climbing the flank of the mountain. A man could go up readily enough at this spot, clambering from one rock to another. The boulders were not unlike easily imagined steps placed by the giant deity of the wild. But it took no second look to be sure that never was the horse foaled that could follow its master here.
Tempting the man there rose from the ridge a tall, bare, and barren peak from which he could hope to have an extended sweep of world about him. He thought that he could come to it within an hour. And if he were to retrace his steps a little, seeking an escape from thecul de sacinto which the stream had led him, it was well to have a look at the country now from some such peak.
He had done this before, perhaps half a dozen times, always selecting carefully the peak which promised the widest expanse of view with the least brush to struggle through. But never had he had the unlimited panorama which rewarded him now. At last he was at the top, after not one but two hours’ hard climb; and he felt that, in sober truth, he had found the top of the world, that he had surmounted it, that he was less in its realm than in that of the wide, blue sky.
Far below the thunder of the stream he had just left was lost, smothered in the walls of its own cañon, stifled among the forests. Here there mounted only the whisper from the imperceptibly stirring millions of branches, not unlike the vague murmur in a sea shell. The peak itself might have been the altar of the god of silence.
East, west, south, whence he had come, Sheldon saw ridge on ridge, peak after peak, No-Luck Land running away until, with other ridges and peaks, it melted into the sky-line.
Looking north, and almost at his feet, the mountainside fell away precipitously. He estimated that he was at an altitude not less than eleven thousand feet. There was snow here, plenty of it, thawing so slowly that not nearly all of it would be gone when the winter came again.
Below him, in the tumbled boulders, were pockets of snow, with bare spaces, and the hardy mountain flowers in the shallow soil. Down he looked and down, until it seemed as though the steep-sided mountains fell away many thousands of dizzy feet. And there below was the wide valley, all one edge of it meadow-land, all the other edge given over to a mighty forest, and at the jagged line lying between wood and field a little lake, calm and blue, with white rocks along the farther rim.
On all sides of the valley lay the sheer mountains, shutting it in so that a man might look down and see the beauties beneath him and yet hesitate to descend, thinking of the difficulties of getting both in and out.
Sheldon had not forgotten the imprint of the bare foot. Nor was he ready to give up the search he had begun, there being no little stubbornness in the man’s nature.
But he stared long down into the valley before him, thinking of the solitude to be found there; the game to be hunted if a man sought game; thinking that some time he would make his way down yonder, joying in the thought that his foot would be the first for years, perhaps generations or even centuries, to travel there. No, however, he would turn back to where Buck waited; seek the pass that must lead out, and learn, if it was fated that he should know, who had made the tracks at the crossing.
His eyes, sweeping now across the field of tumbled rocks which topped the ridge at the base of his peak, were arrested by a flat piece of granite resting on top of a boulder which rose conspicuously above its neighbors.
A monument!
Here, where only a second ago he had told himself that perhaps no other human foot than his own had come! The old sign of a man-made trail, the sign to be read from afar, to last on into eternity. For the shrieking winds of winter and the racing snows do not budge the flat rock laid carefully upon flat-topped stone.
Was he tricking himself? Had nature, in some one of her mad moods, done this trick? He strode over to it swiftly, sliding down the side of the slope up which he had clambered, making his way by leaps and bounds from rock to rock.
The monument was man-made.
Nature doesn’t go out of her way, as some man had done, to get a block of granite, carry it a hundred yardsup-hill, and place it upon a rock of another kind and shade where it can be the more conspicuous.
One monument calls for another in a trackless field of stone. In a moment, farther along the ridge, he found the second monument. He hurried to it. Yonder, lower on the slope, was the third; a hundred yards farther on, the fourth!
He got the trend of the trail now, for it curved only a bit, and then ran straight, straight toward the eastern rim of the valley lying far below him. And the other way, the trail ran back toward the cañon from which he had climbed. A trail here, in the very innermost heart of the Sasnokee-keewan, where men said there were no trails!
Eagerly he turned back toward the cañon. Monument after monument he found, leading cunningly between giant boulders, under cliffs, down a little, upward a little, down again, slowly, gradually seeking the lower altitude. Again and again Sheldon lost the way, which had but rock set on rock to indicate it; but always, going back, he picked it up again.
There were a dozen monuments to show the way before he came down into the meadow a mile above the spot where he had left Buck. And here also, at the base of the slope fully two hundred yards from the willows of the creek, he found a fresh, green willow-rod. It had been dropped here not more than a few hours ago, for the white wood where the bark had been torn away was not dried out. A bit of the bark itself he could tie into a knot without breaking it. And the stick had been cut with a sharp knife, the smooth end showing how one stroke had cut evenly through the half-inch branch.
“My wild man came this way,” was Sheldon’s eager thought. “He knew the trail over the mountain, and has gone on ahead. And that knife of his—”
He shuddered in spite of himself, and again cursed himself for getting what he called “nerves.” But he thought that it was a fair bet that same knife had been driven into the backs of at least two men.
He went back for his horse, walking swiftly. Three hours had slipped away since noon. But he told himself that he was not “burning daylight.” He had found a way over the mountain, a way he believed his horse could go with him. And if luck was good, he’d camp to-night in the valley down into which he had looked from the peak.
And somewhere, far ahead of him, perhaps not a thousand feet away, watching him from behind some tree or rock, was his “wild man!” He was beginning to be certain that it was a man, a little fellow, dwarfed in body and mind and soul, and yet—
And yet the track might have been that of a boy of ten, or of a woman. Right then he swore that he was going to find out whose track that was before he turned his back on the Sasnokee-keewan.
“I’d never be able to get it out of my head if I lived to be a thousand years old if I didn’t get a look at the thing,” he assured himself. “Thank God it’s early in the season.”
When he stopped to rest, he already had the habit of keeping his back to a tree.
Again Sheldon traveled on until after nightfall and moonrise. Even the long twilight of these latitudes had faded when finally, following the monuments of an old, old trail, he came down into the valley which he had overlooked from the peak.
Horse and man were alike tired and hungry. They found a small stream, and in the first grove where there was sufficient grass, Sheldon made his camp for the night. And the fact that he was tired was not the only reason, not even the chief reason perhaps, that he did not build his customary camp-fire.
He ate a couple of cold potatoes, a handful of dried venison, a raw onion, and was content. He even decided that he’d manage without a fire in the morning. The smoke of his fire last night had, no doubt, told of his coming; he meant now to see his wild man before the wild man saw him. So he put it to himself as he tethered Buck in the heart of the grove and made his own bed. And he slept, as a man must sleep so often out on the trail, “with one eye open.”
Through the night he dozed, waking many times. He must have slept soundly just before morning. With the dawn he woke again and did not go to sleep. The uneasy sense was with him, as it had been before that something had wakened him. He sat up, listening.
Only silence and the twitterings of the birds awaking with him. And still a sound echoing in his ears which he could not believe had been only the unreal murmur in a dream. He drew on his boots and slipped out of his blankets. He was wide awake and with no wish to go to sleep again. Turning toward the creek, he stopped suddenly.
There was a sound, far off, faint, only dimly audible. A sound which was at once like the call of some wild thing, some forest creature in distress, and yet like the cry of no animal Sheldon had ever heard. He strained his ears to hear. It was gone, sinking into the silence. And yet he had heard and his blood was tingling.
He snatched up his rifle and ran downstream, dodging behind trees as he went, pausing now and then to peer through the early light, hurrying on again.
“This time, if itisyou, Mr. Wild Man,” he muttered, “I’ll be the one who does the creeping up on you.”
Two hundred yards he went, hearing nothing. Then again it came, a faint, sobbing cry which, as before, stirred his blood strangely. It was so human, and yet not human, he thought. Less than human, more than human—which? Inarticulate, wordless, a bubbling cry of fear, or of physical suffering? The call was gone, sinking as it had sunk before, and again he ran on, his pulses bounding.
With sudden abruptness, before he was aware of it, he had shot out of the timbered land and upon the edge of the little blue lake he had looked down upon yesterday afternoon. Not a hundred paces from him the breeze-stirred ripples of the lake were lapping upon the sandy shore.
Here was one of those white rocks he had marked at the lake’s side. And here upon the rock, arms tossed out toward the sun, which even as he paused breathless shot a first glimmer above the tree-tops, was “his wild man.”
Clad only in the shaggy skin of a brown bear, which was caught over one shoulder, under the other, stitched at the sides with thongs; arms bare, legs, feet bare, the body a burnished copper, the hair long and blown about the shoulders, was a—girl!
He gasped as he saw, still uncertain. A dead limb cracked under his feet, and quick as a deer starts when he hears a man’s step she whirled about, fronting him. He saw her face clearly, and the arm lifted raising his rifle fell lax at his side. For surely she was young, and unless the light lied she was beautiful.
About her forehead, caught into her hair, were strange, red flowers unknown to him. Her arms were round and brown and unthinkably graceful in their swift movements. She was as alert as any wild thing he had ever seen, and had in every gesture that inimitable, swift grace which belongs by birthright to the denizens of the woodlands.
Only an instant did they confront each other thus, the man stricken with a wonder which was half incredulity; the girl still under the shock of surprise. And then, with a little cry, unmistakably of fear, she had leaped from the rock, landed lightly upon the grassy sod, and was running along the lake-shore, her hair floating behind her, flowers dropping from it as she ran.
And John Sheldon, the instant of uncertainty passed, was running mightily after her, shouting.
Not until long, long afterward did the affair strike him as having in it certain of the elements of comedy. Now, God knows, it was all sober seriousness. He shouted to her in English, crying, “Stop; I won’t hurt you!” He shouted in an Indian dialect of which scraps came to him at his need. And then, breathless, he gave over calling.
She had turned her face a little, and he was near enough to hazard the guess that she was frightened, and that at every shout of his the fear of him but leaped the higher in the throbbing breast under the bearskin. So he just settled down to good, hard running; he, John Sheldon, who, in all the days of his life, had never so much as run after a girl, even figuratively speaking.
Even above the surge of a score of other emotions this one stood up in his heart—he counted himself as good a man as other men, and this girl was running away from him as an antelope runs away from a plodding plow-horse.
He saw her clear a fallen log, leaping lightly, and when he came to it he marveled at its size, and as he leaped feared for a second that he was not going to make it. Already she had gained on him; she was still gaining. She looked over her shoulder again; he fancied that the startled terror had gone, that she was less afraid, being confident that she was the fleeter.
“And yet, deuce take it,” he grunted in a sort of anger, “I can’t shoot her!”
The little bare, brown feet seemed to him to have wings, so light and fleet were they, so smoothly and with such amazing speed did they carry her on. Seeing that she would infallibly distance him and slip away from him into the woods where he could never hope to come upon her again, he lifted his voice once more, shouting. And then he cursed himself for a fool. For at the first sound of his voice, booming out loudly, she ran but the faster.
Then suddenly Sheldon thought that he saw his chance. Yonder, a few hundred yards ahead of her, was a wide clearing, and in it he saw that a long arm of the lake was flung far out to the right. She would have to turn there; he did not wait, but turned out now, hoping to cut her off before she could come around the head of the arm of the lake, which, no doubt, in her excitement, she had forgotten.
Straight on she ran. He saw her flash through a little clump of shrubs close to the water’s edge; saw that she was going straight on, and then guessed her purpose. She was not going to turn out. She had disappeared behind the trees. He thought that he had seen her leap far out, just a glint of sun on the bronze of her outflung arms.
Still he pounded on, turning to the right, certain that he could come to the far side before she could swim it. But the arm of the lake extended farther than he had anticipated; already she was far out, swimming as he had seen no man swim in all his life, and he knew that the race was hers. Panting, he stopped and watched; saw the flashing arms, the dark head with the hair floating behind her.
“It’s a wonder that bearskin doesn’t drown her!” was his thought.
And then, coming close to where she had disappeared behind the bushes, he saw the bearskin lying at the edge of the lake, the water lapping it. And John Sheldon, who seldom swore; never when the occasion did not demand it, said simply:
“Well, I’ll be damned. I most certainly will be damned.”
He picked the thing up and looked out across the lake. Just in time to catch the glint of the sun upon a pair of bronze arms thrown high up as though in triumph as his “quarry,” speeding through the screen of willows, disappeared again.
“The little devil!” he muttered, a little in rage, a great deal in admiration.
Carrying the trailing bearskin, still warm from the touch of her body, he turned again to the right, trudging on stubbornly along the arm of the lake. There was no particular reason why he should carry the bearskin. But on he went with it, a trophy of the chase. And in his heart was as stubborn a determination as had ever grown up in that stubborn stronghold. He’d find her, he’d get the explanation of this madness, if it was the last thing in the world he ever did.
And then suddenly, lacking neither imagination nor chivalric delicacy, he felt his face growing red with embarrassment. The situation seemed to him to be presenting its difficulties.
Sheldon gave over asking himself unanswerable questions and hurried on around the end of the lake and into the forest beyond where the lithe racing figure had shot through the shadows like a shimmering gleam of light.
He found her trail and followed it easily, for it ran in a straight line and through a meadow where the grass stood tall and had broken before her.
Only infrequently did it swerve to right or left to avoid one of the big trees in her path. As Sheldon went on he saw many a field flower or tuft of grass which she had bent in her passing straighten up; it seemed to him almost that they were sentient little creatures seeking to tell him “She went this way!”
He was fully prepared to follow the track of her wild flight across miles if need be, his one hope being that she continued in a meadow like this which held the sign of her going. He was no longer running at the top speed with which the chase had begun, nor was he walking as he had been for a moment while she swam. His gait had settled down into a steady, hammering pace which he could keep up for an hour, his one hope being now to win with his greater endurance.
For the most part his eyes kept to the ground that he might not lose the trail and much precious time finding it again. Only now and then would he glance up, to right or left, to make certain that she had not turned out at last to double back or seek shelter in the mountain slopes.
And as he came plunging with accelerated speed down a gentle incline, swinging about a grove of young firs which stood with outflung branches interlacing so that they made a dense dark wall, his eyes were upon the ground, watchful for her trail.
For a second he lost it; then, without checking his speed he found it, turning again, a very little, this time to the left to avoid a second thickly massed group of young firs.
He ran around this, swerved again a very little as he came up out of the hollow and to a flat open space, saw the track leading straight across the level sward, entered a larger grove of firs, lost the trail for a dozen steps, ran on, shot out of the grove and—came to a dead halt, staring in utter amazement.
If at that moment he had been asked who in all the wide world was the simon-pure king of fools, he would have answered in unqualified vehemence, “John Sheldon!”
With a bearskin which he must admit he had acquired rather in defiance of convention, in one hand, with a rifle in the other, his hat back yonder somewhere under the limb which had knocked it off, looking he was sure such a fool as never a man looked before, he was standing with both feet planted squarely in the middle of the main street of a town!
He had more than a suspicion that in some mysterious way he had gotten very drunk without knowing it. He was by no means positive that he was not a raving maniac. If he had been obliged to tell his name at that bewildering second it is a toss whether he would have said “King Sheldon,” or “John Fool.”
His mind was a blank to all emotions and sensations save the one that reddened his face. If a man had ever foretold that he would some day see a girl out in the woods, upon a lake shore where no doubt she was going to take a bath; that he would first scare her half out of her wits and then wildly pursue her for a quarter of a mile, shouting God knows what madness at her; that he’d grab up the morning robe which she’d worn and come waving it after as he ran; that he’d rush on so blindly that he didn’t know what he was doing until he was right square in the middle of a town—well, it would be mild to say that he would have dubbed that man an incurable idiot.
And yet in front of him stood a house, builded compactly of logs and rudely squared timbers, that might have stood there half of a century. To the right stood a house. To the left a house. Straight ahead ran a narrow street, houses upon the right, houses upon the left. In that blindly groping moment he felt that he had never seen so many houses all at once in all the days of his life. And yet he was no stranger to San Francisco or Vancouver nor yet New York!
He hardly knew what to expect first: A great shout of laughter as men and women saw him, or a shot from a double-barreled shotgun.
“If she’s got a father or a brother and he doesn’t shoot me,” he muttered, “he’s no man.”
But there came neither shout of laughter nor shot of gun. As the first wave of stupefaction surged over him and passed, leaving him a little more clear-thoughted, there came the inclination to draw back swiftly into the trees before he was seen.
But he stood stone still. For at last it was evident that there was no one to see. There was the town, unmistakably a typical, rude mining camp. But it was still, deserted, a veritable city of desolation.
Nowhere did a rock chimney send up its smoke to stain the clear sky; the street was empty, grown up with grass and weeds and even young trees; no child’s voice in laughter or man or woman’s voice calling; no dog’s bark to vibrate through the stillness which was absolute; no sound of ax on wood or of hammer or of horses’ hoofs; no stirring object upon the steps which were rotting away, nor at door or window.
No sign of life, though he turned this way and that, searching. Everywhere the wilderness was pushing in again where once man had come, vanquishing it. Before him was the most drearily desolate scene that had ever stood out before his eyes. In some strange way it was unutterably, indescribably sad.
He came on again, slowly. Obeying an impulse which he did not consciously recognize, he stepped softly as a man does in a death chamber. His soul was oppressed, his spirit drooped suddenly as the atmosphere of the abandoned camp fell upon it.
By daylight, gloom haunted the tenantless buildings; by night, here would be melancholia’s own demesne. Nowhere else in the world does one find that terrible sadness which spreads its somber wings in the abode of man long given over to the wild to be a lair for its soft-footed children.
More questions demanding answers and all unanswerable. He sought to throw off the influence which had fallen upon him and went on more swiftly, seeking the girl who had fled here. Had she stopped in one of these ruined houses? Was one of them “home” to her? Who lived here with her? And why? Were they, like himself, chance comers, newly arrived? Or did they, like the log houses, belong to this land; were they like everything of man here, being drawn back into the mighty arms of the wild?
This part of the world, the fastnesses stretching from Belle Fortune to Ruminoff Shanty on the Gold River, was what he and his fellows glibly called “new country.” What country on the earth is new? What nook or corner has not once known the foot of man and his conquering hand? And, given time, what bit of the world has not in the end hurled its conqueror out, trodden down his monuments, made dust of his labors, and crowned his hearths in creeping vines and forgetfulness, wresting it all back from him?
The thoughts which came to him had their own way in a mind which was half given to the search resumed. Questions came involuntarily; he did not pause or seek to answer them. Hurriedly he went up and down, turning out for fallen timbers, circling tangled growths.
At every open door and window he looked in eagerly, noting less the sagging panels and broken shutters than the dark interiors. Many roofs had fallen, many walls were down, many buildings were but rectangular heaps of ruins grown over grass. But other houses, builded solidly of great logs, with sturdy steep roofs, stood defiantly.
“There was a time when hundreds of men lived here,” he thought as he hastened on. “Men and women, maybe, and perhaps children! Why did they go like this? Even a town may die like a man, even its name be forgotten in a generation or two.”
Pushing through a rear yard long ago so reclaimed by the wilderness that he must fight his way through brush shoulder high, he came out suddenly upon a path. It ran, broad and straight, toward the lake. There, upon a little knoll, until now hidden from him by the trees, was the largest building of the village, the one in a state of the best preservation. The path ran to the door. On either side of the doorstep, cleared of weeds, was a space in which grew tall red flowers. He stopped a moment, his heart beating fast.
The door was closed, the windows were covered with heavy shutters. He came on again, walking warily, his eyes everywhere at once. What should a man expect here in the dead city of the Sasnokee-keewan? A rifle ball as readily as anything else. And yet he came on steadily, his own rifle ready.
At last he stood not ten steps from the closed door, wondering. Some one lived here; so much was certain. The well-worn path told it eloquently. Then, too, there were signs of digging about the little flower garden. A woman’s work—hers. And she, herself, was she in there now?
“I might go up to the door and knock,” he muttered. “The regular way when you want to know if any one is at home! But I have precious little desire to become pile of bleached bones number three.”
He lifted his voice and called. A startled squirrel that had been watching him curiously vanished with a sudden whisk of tail, and a big woodpecker upon a distant falling wall cocked a pair of bright eyes at him impertinently. Sheldon waited, turned this way and that, called again. Then again, louder.
“Devil take it,” he grunted in sudden irritation. “There’s got to be an end of this tomfoolery. If I have to do with crazy folk I might as well know it now as any time.”
He went up the two steps to the door and rapped sharply. Still there came no answer. He rapped again and then put his hand to the latch. The door was fastened from within.
“Who’s in there?” he called. “Can’t you answer me?”
His voice died away into silence; the woodpecker went back to his carpentering. A hush lay over the world about him.
He called again, explained that his intentions were friendly, argued with the silence, pleaded and then lost his temper.
“Open!” he shouted, “or by the Lord I’ll beat your old door off its hinges!”
Then, for the first time, he thought that he heard a sound from within, the gentle fall of a foot as some one moved. His head turned a little, listening eagerly, he heard no other sound.
Lifting his rifle, he drove the butt hard against the door. It creaked, rattled, and held. He struck again, harder.
His rifle was swung back for the third blow when a voice answered him, the voice of a girl, clear but troubled, uncertain, thrilling him strangely with the note in it he had heard this morning when he awoke, suggesting as it did the wild.
“Wait,” said the voice. “Wait—a—little—while.”
To describe the voice, to put a name to the subtle quality of it which made it different from any other voice Sheldon had ever heard was as impossible as to describe the perfume of a violet to one who has no olfactory nerve.
But in one respect her speech was definitely distinctive, in that each word came separately, enunciated slowly, spoken with the vaguest hint of an effort, as though her tongue were not used to shaping itself to words at all.
“All right,” answered Sheldon. “That’s fair. How long do you want me to wait?”
“Just—little—bit,” came the clear answer, the little pauses seeming to indicate that she was seeking always for the right word. “Not—damn—long.”
“Oh!” said Sheldon.
“Go over by that house that is all broken,” continued the voice. “Then I will open the door.” There came a pause, then the words uttered with great impressiveness: “Do what I say almighty quick or I’ll cut your white liver out!”
Sheldon obeyed, wondering more than ever. As he went he dropped the bearskin close to the door.
“I’m putting your—your dress where you can reach out and get it,” he said as he went.
There was no answer.
As directed, Sheldon went back down the knoll until he stood near a tumble-down shanty there, some fifty or sixty feet from the sturdy log house, from which he did not remove his eyes. As he went the door opened a very little, just enough for a pair of alert and vigilant eyes to watch him.
When he stopped he was prepared to see a round, brown arm slip out to retrieve the fallen bearskin. But instead the door opened quickly, there stepped out what at first glance seemed to be a boy clad in man’s trousers, boots, and terribly torn and patched blue shirt. But her hair lay in two loosely plaited braids across her shoulders, and hardly the second glance was needed to assure him that here was no boy, but she who had fled before him.
In coming out the door had opened just far enough for her to pass out, then had been closed so quickly that he had had no glimpse of the cabin’s interior. She stood still, a hand upon the latch behind her, facing him.
Sheldon raised his hand to lift his hat, remembered and said quietly:
“Good morning.”
“Good morning,” she repeated after him.
He was near enough to guess something of what lay in her eyes. Certainly a strange sort of curiosity underlay her penetrating gaze which seemed in all frankness to search deeply for all that a long look could tell her.
And, it seemed to him, under this look lay another that hinted to him that she’d whirl, jerk the door open, and disappear in a flash if he so much as took a step forward. So he moved back another pace or two, to reassure her, leaning against a fragment of wall.
If she regarded him with fixed intentness, no less did the man stare at her. There was every sign of hasty dressing; she must have drawn on the first garments falling to her hurrying hands. The boots were unquestionably many sizes too large; trousers and shirt were monstrously ill-fitting. And, even so, the amazing thing was that she was most undeniably pretty. And, burned as she was from the sun, she was not an Indian. Her hair was a sunkissed brown; her eyes, he fancied, were gray.
“I am sorry,” said Sheldon after a considerable silence, “that I frightened you just now.”
Her gaze did not waver, lost nothing of its steady, searching intentness. He could see no change of expression upon her slightly parted lips. She offered no remark to his, but stood waiting.
“I think,” he went on in a little, putting all of the friendliness he could manage into his voice, “that I was at first startled as much as you. I’d hardly expected to stumble upon a girl here, you know!”
If she did know she didn’t take the trouble to tell him that she did. There was something positively disconcerting in the scrutiny to which she so openly subjected him.
“You see,” he continued his monologue stoutly, determined to overlook any little idiosyncrasies, “it was a surprise to me to see your tracks, in the first place. And then to come upon you like that—and to find this old settlement here— Why, I had always thought that no man had ever so much as builded him a dugout in the Sasnokee-keewan.”
He stopped suddenly. It struck him as ridiculous: this was he babbling on while she stood there looking at him like that. Certainly he had given her ample opportunity to say something. Yet she seemed to have not the slightest intention of opening her mouth. Still she watched him as one might watch some new, strange animal.
“What’s the matter?” he demanded sharply, her attitude beginning to irritate him. “Can’t you talk?”
“Yes.” Just the monosyllable, clearly enunciated. She had answered his question; he hoped she would go on. But she made no offer to do so.
“Well,” cried the man, “why don’t you? You’re not keeping still because we haven’t been introduced, are you? Good Lord, why do you look at me like I was part of a side show? Didn’t you ever see a man before? I’m not trying to flirt with you! Say something!”
His nerves had been tense, and at best his temper was likely to flare out now and then. He wished for a second that she was a few years younger so that he could take her across his knee.
“Flirt?” she repeated after him, lifting her brows. She shook her head. “What must I say?”
The suspicion came upon him that she was secretly enjoying herself at his expense, and he said quickly:
“I should think you could find a number of things to say here where a stranger doesn’t come every day. You might even ask me inside and strain no sense of convention. You might offer me a cup of coffee and nobody would accuse you of being forward! You might tell me where I am and what town this is—or was. You might tell me something about the rest of your party, where they are, and when I can have a talk with some one who is willing to talk.”
For a moment she seemed to be pondering what he had said. Then, as bidden, she answered, speaking slowly, taking up point by point:
“You cannot come inside. I would lock the door. I would shoot you with a big gun I have in there. It is like yours, but bigger. Coffee?” She shook her head as she had before. “I don’t know what that is. This town is Johnny’s Luck. I have no one else for you to talk to. You must go away.”
Sheldon stared at her incredulously. The short laugh with which he meant to answer her was a bit forced, unconvincing in his own ears. The girl watched him with the same keen, speculative eyes.
“You don’t mean for me to believe that you are here all alone?” he demanded.
She hesitated. Then she answered in her own words of a moment ago:
“I have no one else for you to talk to.”
“That’s pure nonsense, you know,” he retorted bluntly. She made no reply.
“I got off my trail and blundered into this place,” he went on presently. “I’m going on out presently. I’m not going to trouble you or any of your people.”
“That is nice,” was the first remark voluntarily given. Sheldon flushed.
“Just the same,” he said a little sternly, “I’m not going out like a blind fool without finding out a thing or two. If you’re up to some kind of a lark it strikes me that it’s run on about long enough. There’s precious little use in your pretending to be the only one in here.”
By now he knew better than to expect her to speak except in reply to a direct question, and so continued:
“Will you tell me who you are?”
“I am Paula.”
“Paula?” he said. “Paulawhat?”
“Just Paula,” quietly.
“But your other name?”
“I have just one name. I am Paula.”
For the life of him he did not know what to make of her. There was the possibility that she was playing with him. In that case she played her part amazingly well! There was the possibility that she spoke in actual as well as in seeming sincerity.
“Who is your father?” he asked abruptly.
And at her answer, calmly, quietly spoken, he was startled into the suspicion of the third possibility—madness.
For she had answered gravely:
“He is a king. His name is Midas.”
From under gathered brows his eyes probed at her like knives. Was she hoaxing him, or was she mad? Unless she was crazed why did she so cleverly seek to appear so? What maid stands out before a man, stranger though he be, and poses to him in the light of an insane woman? If she were not mad, then why was she striving to make him believe her so? Then why?
He had come to her for answers, and he but got new questions that were, as yet, unanswerable. When he spoke again it was thoughtfully.
“Why do you tell me your father is King Midas?” he asked.
“Because you said to me, ‘Who is your father?’”
“And you just naturally and truthfully tell me he is a king! What’s the use of this nonsense?”
She made no reply. There was a little silence before he spoke. There came to him clearly the sound as of some heavy object falling upon bare floor within the cabin.
“There is some one else in there!” he exclaimed impatiently. “Who is it? Why don’t they come out and answer me sensibly if you won’t?”
Positively now there was a quick look of alarm upon her face. For a second he thought that she was going to whisk back into the house. And then she cried hurriedly:
“He is in there—yes. The king! And Napoleon is there and Richard and Johnny Lee. Shall I throw open the door for them to put out their guns and shoot you?”
“Great Heavens!” gasped Sheldon. And to her, wonderingly, “Why should they shoot me? What harm am I doing any one?”
“I know!” Her voice, until now so quiet, suddenly rang out passionately. “You come from the world outside, from over there!” she threw out her arm widely toward the south. “You come over the mountains from the world outside where all men are bad! Where they fight like beasts for what we have here, where they steal and kill and cheat and lie and snatch from one another like hungry coyotes and wolves! You come here to steal and kill. I know! Haven’t others come before you, bad men creeping in from the outside?”
A strange sort of shiver ran through Sheldon’s blood. But, with quick inspiration, he asked her:
“And what has happened to them?”
“They died!” was the unhesitating answer. “As you, too, will die and quick if you do not go out and leave us. I should have killed you last night while you slept. But you startled me; I had never seen a man like you. The others had beards; you had no hair upon your face and for a little I thought you were a woman, another like me, and I was glad. And then you woke—and I ran. I should have killed you—”